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Abstract

This article proposes a new delivery-centric abstraction which extends the existing content-centric networking API. A delivery-centric abstraction allows applications to generate content requests agnostic to location or protocol, with the additional ability to stipulate high-level requirements regarding such things as performance, security, and resource consumption. Fulfilling these requirements, however, is complex as often the ability of a provider to satisfy requirements will vary between different consumers and over time. Therefore, we argue that it is vital to manage this variance to ensure an application fulfils its needs. To this end, we present the Juno middleware, which implements delivery-centric support using a reconfigurable software architecture to: (i) discover multiple sources of an item of content; (ii) model each source’s ability to provide the content; then (iii) adapt to interact with the source(s) that can best fulfil the application’s requirements. Juno therefore utilizes existing providers in a backwards compatible way, supporting immediate deployment. This article evaluates Juno using Emulab to validate its ability to adapt to its environment.